Digital 2013 Workshop 4 – STV asks Responsive or Native?

When building world-class digital projects, the importance of crafting and designing content is fundamental in new media design. Digital Design can’t be done in isolation and requires bringing digital talent with responsive design techniques to create a compelling digital asset and optimal viewing experiences.

Introduced by Alistair, Michael and Remi will explore the latest approaches and techniques to responsive design and will cover the strategy and approaches they took to developing the mobile, Digital TV, Broadband and Online STV Players, which deliver the catch up TV service across Scotland.

With the prime Objective being Engagement, Michael and Remi will discuss how their responsive design strategy, across multiple platforms and devices, resulted in more people visiting STV Player and created a compelling engaging experience for the viewer!

Advertisers are yet to catch up. Print taking more advertising £s than people, mobile taking much less advertising than people.

Challenge for STV is to retain relationship with audience as they move to mobile etc. So how are they doing that?

There’s a technical cost of supporting different formats. People however are moving away from the web so need to consider specific designs and content for different formats (as there must be a benefit in apps etc for users, otherwise they wouldn’t be moving). Now live on 8 platforms which = 8 platforms to support. Is this the right approach? Should they drop support for the play station.

Native or HTML? That is the question – design a flexible product (HTML5) or design a specific app (e.g. native iPhone app).

Easier to monetise an iphone app than an html 5 app

Don’t have an html5 version, then you frustrate users of the platforms that you haven’t built a native app for.

Native can give you a competitive advantage through providing a better user experience but if that is your strongest competitive advantage perhaps your days are numbered?

The number of platforms is only increasing.

STV are moving away from native apps to some extent anyway. So will have an reponsive html 5 version and a dedicated native app for some platforms only.

Very data driven – Have 14000 users that they get data from/speak to on regular basis.

Validate with customers before developing.

New responsive design . Launching next week. “Its not for STV, its for the audience”